THE persons behind the organisation calling itself the International Decade for People of African Descent Assembly – Guyana (IDPADA-G) attempted a monumental feat on Monday to justify how $468 million of public funds from the period of 2018 to 2022 were spent. These are public funds allocated to the organisation through the national budget by way of a subvention from a government ministry.

IDPADA-G opted for a one-hour and 23-minute press conference where a head-table mixture of technical officers and committee members provided mostly anecdotal evidence of impact on the communities they supported, which later culminated in a four-page document with brief numbers attempting to justify how the monies were spent. Questions still abound.

The clamour to justify the multi-year expenditure comes after damning allegations from Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo on Friday that the organisation was yet to show how it expended public monies given to it over the last four years to support people of African descent, which appears to be the organisation’s target population. It is now public record that more than $42 million was spent by the organisation on salaries alone based on financial documents which were shared with the government upon request.

In his remarks, the IDPADA-G’s Chairman, Vincent Alexander, on Monday, said that the organisation’s salary-to-overall-budget ratio is more in line with the salary-to-current-expenditure ratio utilised in Guyana’s public sector. Interestingly, one would think that IDPADA-G operates within the third sector, civil society, and would budget internally based on the idea that its funding sources are never guaranteed as compared to the public sector which is guaranteed funding through the national budget. If the organisation has based its budget lines on the public sector model, it ran the risk of being unsustainable if not guaranteed a funding source. That funding source, however, cannot be the public purse.

Considering the work of the organisation, there’s a likelihood that there were quite a few duplications of services already offered by the public system as some of its programmes reflected work either already done by public agencies or, by all indications, still required technical support of persons within the public sector in order to deliver on the “capacity building”. These sessions, in turn, appears to be the dominant programme activity invested in by the organisation, accounting for $78 million spent between 2018 to 2020. It is, therefore, still to be answered on how training was facilitated, who were paid to facilitate these trainings, how many persons benefitted from the trainings, what were the costs associated for these trainings, and, were the outputs and outcomes realised.

The attempts by Alexander to justify that IDPADA-G is not a grants organisation was even more worrying considering the large amounts of money provided to the body, that Alexander admitted during the press conference operated more as an umbrella organisation for other African descent interest groups in Guyana. Even more astonishing is that with such an already herculean task of having to account for the hundreds of millions allocated to it, and demonstrate how its sole target population benefitted, the organisation is opting to request an increase to $158 million per year of that subvention that already stands at $100 million per year.

In his attempt to outline the areas which IDPADA-G worked, Alexander said these include “education and training, disaster response, public education, entrepreneurial facilitation and youth development”. Much of these were soft-skills related and resulted in very little direct benefit to the communities.

Alexander repeatedly refused to respond to questions as to why other organisations did not receive funding through IDPADA-G, saying, instead, that the focus on his organisation was to organise activities to benefit the target population, and mobilise their target population to access services. The press conference leaves quite a number of questions unanswered. The allegation that $42 million was spent annually on staffing for the body seems to have quite a few truths behind it, for an organisation that has approximately 20 full-time staff members. Alexander admitted that the organisation’s salaries amounted to $42 million for a particular year.

Additionally, as far as its claim to success is concerned, the organisation’s Chief Executive Officer, Olive Sampson, said $4.9 million was spent on a survey to identify persons in communities who had not yet received government assistance in late 2021 after a flood. There must be wider probing of the spending practises, especially since it was admitted that approximately 50 per cent of the annual subvention was spent on operations alone.

The IDPADA-G was housed for some time in a Regent Street, Georgetown building which is now where the Office of the Leader of the Opposition is located. IDPADA-G has been relocated to a North Road, Georgetown building where former President Desmond Hoyte once called his home. Who owns the Regent Street property and how much money was spent on rental there? Why was the organisation registered as a private company rather than as a Friendly Society as other not-for-profit organisations?

Was government’s funding the only source of funding for IDPADA-G? If not, what percentage of the organisation’s overall operations were paid for directly by Guyanese taxpayers who are yet to benefit from this arrangement? IDPADA-G must do more to demonstrate how its target population benefitted from taxpayer monies.